The Easter Rising
The Easter Rising of 1916, which resulted in pitched battles in the streets of Dublin, is remembered as one of the key events leading to Irish self-government. In fact, at the time, it seemed to most Nationalists a botched and inconclusive event. Leaders of the Irish Volunteers , a Nationalist group that had been founded in 1913, secretly planned a nationwide uprising for Easter Sunday 1916. The insurrection was to be staged with the help of a shipment of arms from Germany which were to be picked up by Sir Roger Casement . Things began to go wrong almost immediately: the arms arrived a day too early, and the British apprehended Casement and hanged him. So secret had the preparations for the uprising been that the Irish Volunteers' leader, Eoin MacNeill, knew nothing of them. A week before Easter, the extremist plotters, led by Padraig Pearse , showed MacNeill a forged order, purporting to come from the British authorities at Dublin Castle, for the suppression of the Irish Volunteers. MacNeill consented to give the order for the uprising. Then, the day before it was due to happen, he learned that the document was a forgery, and placed advertisements in the Sunday papers cancelling the insurrection. Pearse and his allies, however, pressed ahead in Dublin only the next day: Easter Monday. They took, among other public buildings, the General Post Office (GPO) in O'Connell Street, and Pearse walked out onto the steps of the GPO to read the historic Proclamation of the Irish Republic . Fighting continued for five days before being suppressed by the British authorities. It was not the rising itself, but the British reaction to it, that was significant for the Republicans. The authorities executed a total of fifteen leaders of the rebellion, including Pearse and another patriot, James Connolly, at Kilmainham Gaol . The result in the eyes of the public, however, was to turn these men into martyrs to the Nationalist cause. When, a year later, the British attempted to introduce conscription to the trenches of World War I, the public mood turned sharply away from any form of compromise with British rule and towards demands for full independence, which was finally achieved in 1921.
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